I was very cautious in my wording dook .
The first production rocket seat was in the F102 in the 50's and if you look at the height of the fin you can see what the main consideration was in that case.
The" low and slow" requirement was a later driver , albeit an extremely relevant one as addressed by M.B My comment of "primarily to keep the seat going on up post the gun firing" was meant to embrace that, on the way to "Zero Zero" and the later ACES and Russian seats, as later publicly demonstrated by Anatoly Kvochur out of the MiG 29 at Paris in 1989..
Like many others I initially thought that the rocket was primarily to help spread the "g" load during ejection. A fallacy that I was quickly disabused of during study detachments to the R.A.F.Institute of Aviation Medicine in the late 60's and early 70's.
Last edited by Haraka; 8th Nov 2018 at 09:58.